Chapter 13

His two plays were reprinted in J.P. Collier’sFive Old Plays(1833), in Hazlitt’s edition ofDodsley’s Old Plays, and inNero and other Plays(Mermaid series, 1888), with an introduction by Mr A.W. Verity.

FIELD, STEPHEN JOHNSON(1816-1899), American jurist, was born at Haddam, Connecticut, on the 4th of November 1816. He was the brother of David Dudley Field, Cyrus W.Field and Henry M. Field. At the age of thirteen he accompanied his sister Emilia and her husband the Rev. Josiah Brewer (the parents of the distinguished judge of the Supreme Court, David J. Brewer) to Smyrna, Turkey, for the purpose of studying Oriental languages, but after three years he returned to the United States, and in 1837 graduated at Williams College at the head of his class. He then studied law in his elder brother’s office, and in 1841 he was admitted to the New York bar. He was associated in practice there with his brother until 1848, and early in 1849 removed to California, settling soon afterward at Marysville, of which place, in 1850, he became the first alcalde or mayor. In the same year he was chosen a member of the first state legislature of California, in which he drew up and secured the enactment of two bodies of law known as the Civil and Criminal Practices Acts, based on the similar codes prepared by his brother David Dudley for New York. In the former act he embodied a provision regulating and giving authority to the peculiar customs, usages, and regulations voluntarily adopted by the miners in various districts of the state for the adjudication of disputed mining claims. This, as Judge Field truly says, “was the foundation of the jurisprudence respecting mines in the country,” having greatly influenced legislation upon this subject in other states and in the Congress of the United States. He was elected, in 1857, a justice of the California Supreme Court, of which he became chief justice in 1859, on the resignation of Judge David S. Terry to fight the duel with the United States senator David C. Broderick which ended fatally for the latter. Field held this position until 1863, when he was appointed by President Lincoln a justice of the United States Supreme Court. In this capacity he was conspicuous for fearless independence of thought and action in his opinion in the test oath case, and in his dissenting opinions in the legal tender, conscription and “slaughter house” cases, which displayed unusual legal learning, and gave powerful expression to his strict constructionist theory of the implied powers of the Federal constitution. Originally a Democrat, and always a believer in states’ rights, his strong Union sentiments caused him nevertheless to accept Lincoln’s doctrine of coercion, and that, together with his anti-slavery sympathies, led him to act with the Republican party during the period of the Civil War. He was a member of the commission which revised the California code in 1873 and of the Electoral Commission in 1877, voting in favour of Tilden. In 1880 he received sixty-five votes on the first ballot for the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention at Cincinnati. In August 1889, as a result of a ruling in the course of the Sharon-Hill litigation, a notorious conspiracy case, he was assaulted in a California railway station by Judge David S. Terry, who in turn was shot and killed by a United States deputy marshall appointed to defend Justice Field against the carrying out of Terry’s often-expressed threats. He retired from the Supreme Court on the 1st of December 1897 after a service of thirty-four years and six months, the longest in the court’s history, and died in Washington on the 9th of April 1899.

HisPersonal Reminiscences of Early Days in California, originally privately printed in 1878, was republished in 1893 with George C. Gorham’sStory of the Attempted Assassination of Justice Field.

FIELD, WILLIAM VENTRIS FIELD,Baron(1813-1907), English judge, second son of Thomas Flint Field, of Fielden, Bedfordshire, was born on the 21st of August 1813. He was educated at King’s school, Bruton, Somersetshire, and entered the legal profession as a solicitor. In 1843, however, he ceased to practise as such, and entered at the Inner Temple, being called to the bar in 1850, after having practised for some time as a special pleader. He joined the Western circuit, but soon exchanged it for the Midland. He obtained a large business as a junior, and became a queen’s counsel and bencher of his inn in 1864. As a Q.C. he had a very extensive common law practice, and had for some time been the leader of the Midland circuit, when in February 1875, on the retirement of Mr Justice Keating, he was raised to the bench as a justice of the queen’s bench. Mr Justice Field was an excellent puisne judge of the type that attracts but little public attention. He was a first-rate lawyer, had a good knowledge of commercial matters, great shrewdness and a quick intellect, while he was also painstaking and scrupulously fair. When the rules of the Supreme Court 1883 came into force in the autumn of that year, Mr Justice Field was so well recognized an authority upon all questions of practice that the lord chancellor selected him to sit continuously at Judges’ Chambers, in order that a consistent practice under the new rules might as far as possible be established. This he did for nearly a year, and his name will always, to a large extent, be associated with the settling of the details of the new procedure, which finally did away with the former elaborate system of “special pleading.” In 1890 he retired from the bench and was raised to the peerage as Baron Field of Bakeham, becoming at the same time a member of the privy council. In the House of Lords he at first took part, not infrequently, in the hearing of appeals, and notably delivered a carefully-reasoned judgment in the case of theBank of Englandv.Vagliano Brothers(5th of March 1891), in which, with Lord Bramwell, he differed from the majority of his brother peers. Before long, however, deafness and advancing years rendered his attendances less frequent. Lord Field died at Bognor on the 23rd of January 1907, and as he left no issue the peerage became extinct.

FIELD(a word common to many West German languages, cf. Ger.Feld, Dutchveld, possibly cognate with O.E.folde, the earth, and ultimately with root of the Gr.πλατός, broad), open country as opposed to woodland or to the town, and particularly land for cultivation divided up into separate portions by hedges, banks, stone walls, &c.; also used in combination with words denoting the crop grown on such a portion of land, such as corn-field, turnip-field, &c. The word is similarly applied to a region with particular reference to its products, as oil-field, gold-field, &c. For the “open” or “common field” system of agriculture in village communities seeCommons. Generally with a reference to their “wild” as opposed to their “domestic” nature “field” is applied to many animals, such as the “field-mouse.” There are many applications of the word; thus from the use of the term for the place where a battle is fought, and widely of the whole theatre of war, come such phrases as to “take the field” for the opening of a campaign, “in the field” of troops that are engaged in the operations of a campaign. It is frequently used figuratively in this sense, of the subject matter of a controversy, and also appears in military usage, in field-fortification, field-day and the like. A “field-officer” is one who ranks above a captain and below a general (seeOfficers); a field marshal is the highest rank of general officer in the British and many European armies (seeMarshal). “Field” is used in many games, partly with the idea of an enclosed space, partly with the idea of the ground of military operations, for the ground in which such games as cricket, football, baseball and the like are played. Hence it is applied to those players in cricket and baseball who are not “in,” and “to field” is to perform the functions of such a player—to stop or catch the ball played by the “in” side. “The field” is used in hunting, &c., for those taking part in the sport, and in racing for all the horses entered for a race, and, in such expressions as “to back the field,” is confined to all the horses with the exception of the “favourite.” A common application of the word is to a surface, more or less wide, as of the sky or sea, or of such physical phenomena as ice or snow, and particularly of the ground, of a special “tincture,” on which armorial bearings are displayed (seeHeraldry); it is thus used also of the “ground” of a flag, thus the white ensign of the British navy has a red St George’s cross on a white “field.” In scientific usage the word is also used of the sphere of observation or of operations, and has come to be almost equivalent to a department of knowledge. In physics, a particular application is that to the area which is influenced by some agent, as in the magnetic or electric field. The field of observation or view is the area within which objects can be seen through any optical instrument at any one position. A “field-glass” is the name given to a binocular glass used in the field (seeBinocular Instrument); the older form of field-glass was a small achromatic telescope with joints. This terms is also applied, in an astronomical telescope or compound microscope, tothat one of the two lenses of the “eye-piece” which is next to the object-glass; the other is called the “eye-glass.”

FIELDFARE(O.E.fealo-for= fallow-farer), a large species of thrush, theTurdus pilarisof Linnaeus—well known as a regular and common autumnal visitor throughout the British Islands and a great part of Europe, besides western Asia, and even reaching northern Africa. It is theVeldjakkerandVeld-lysterof the Dutch, theWachholderdrosselandKramtsvogelof Germans, theLitorneof the French, and theCesenaof Italians. This bird is of all thrushes the most gregarious in. habit, not only migrating in large bands and keeping in flocks during the winter, but even commonly breeding in society—200 nests or more having been seen within a very small space. The birch-forests of Norway, Sweden and Russia are its chief resorts in summer, but it is known also to breed sparingly in some districts of Germany. Though its nest has been many times reported to have been found in Scotland, there is perhaps no record of such an incident that is not open to doubt; and unquestionably the missel-thrush (T. viscivorus) has been often mistaken for the fieldfare by indifferent observers. The head, neck, upper part of the back and the rump are grey; the wings, wing-coverts and middle of the back are rich hazel-brown; the throat is ochraceous; and the breast reddish-brown—both being streaked or spotted with black, while the belly and lower wing-coverts are white, and the legs and toes very dark-brown. The nest and eggs resemble those of the blackbird (T. merula), but the former is usually built high up in a tree. The fieldfare’s call-note is harsh and loud, sounding liket’chatt’chat: its song is low, twittering and poor. It usually arrives in Britain about the middle or end of October, but sometimes earlier, and often remains till the middle of May before departing for its northern breeding-places. In hard weather it throngs to the berry-bearing bushes which then afford it sustenance, but in open winters the flocks spread over the fields in search of animal food—worms, slugs and the larvae of insects. In very severe seasons it will altogether leave the country, and then return for a shorter or longer time as spring approaches. FromWilliam of Palerne(translated from the French c. 1350) to the writers of our own day the fieldfare has occasionally been noticed by British poets with varying propriety. Thus Chaucer’s association Of its name with frost is as happy as true, while Scott was more than unlucky in his well-known reference to its “lowly nest” in the Highlands.

Structurally very like the fieldfare, but differing greatly in many other respects, is the bird known in North America as the “robin”—its ruddy breast and familiar habits reminding the early British settlers in the New World of the household favourite of their former homes. This bird, theTurdus migratoriusof Linnaeus, has a wide geographical range, extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from Greenland to Guatemala, and, except at its extreme limits, is almost everywhere a very abundant species. As its scientific name imports, it is essentially a migrant, and gathers in flocks to pass the winter in the south, though a few remain in New England throughout the year. Yet its social instincts point rather in the direction of man than of its own kind, and it is not known to breed in companies, while it affects the homesteads, villages and even the parks and gardens of the large cities, where its fine song, its attractive plumage, and its great services as a destroyer of noxious insects, combine to make it justly popular.

(A. N.)

FIELDING, ANTHONY VANDYKE COPLEY(1787-1855), commonly called Copley Fielding, English landscape painter (son of a portrait painter), became at an early age a pupil of John Varley. He took to water-colour painting, and to this he confined himself almost exclusively. In 1810 he became an associate exhibitor in the Water-colour Society, in 1813 a full member, and in 1831 president of that body. He also engaged largely in teaching the art, and made ample profits. His death took place at Worthing in March 1855. Copley Fielding was a painter of much elegance, taste and accomplishment, and has always been highly popular with purchasers, without reaching very high in originality of purpose or of style: he painted in vast number all sorts of views (occasionally in oil-colour) including marine subjects in large proportion. Specimens of his work are to be seen in the water-colour gallery of the Victoria and Albert Museum, of dates ranging from 1829 to 1850. Among the engraved specimens of his art is theAnnual of British Landscape Scenery, published in 1839.

(W. M. R.)

FIELDING, HENRY(1707-1754), English novelist and playwright, was born at Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury, Somerset, on the 22nd of April 1707. His father was Lieutenant Edmund Fielding, third son of John Fielding, who was canon of Salisbury and fifth son of the earl of Desmond. The earl of Desmond belonged to the younger branch of the Denbigh family, who, until lately, were supposed to be connected with the Habsburgs. To this claim, now discredited by the researches of Mr J. Horace Round (Studies in Peerage, 1901, pp. 216-249), is to be attributed the famous passage in Gibbon’sAutobiographywhich predicts forTom Jones—“that exquisite picture of human manners”—a diuturnity exceeding that of the house of Austria. Henry Fielding’s mother was Sarah Gould, daughter of Sir Henry Gould, a judge of the king’s bench. It is probable that the marriage was not approved by her father, since, though she remained at Sharpham Park for some time after that event, his will provided that her husband should have nothing to do with a legacy of £3000 left her in 1710. About this date the Fieldings moved to East Stour in Dorset. Two girls, Catherine and Ursula, had apparently been born at Sharpham Park; and three more, together with a son, Edmund, followed at East Stour. Sarah, the third of the daughters, born November 1710, and afterwards the author ofDavid Simpleand other works, survived her brother.

Fielding’s education up to his mother’s death, which took place in April 1718 at East Stour, seems to have been entrusted to a neighbouring clergyman, Mr Oliver of Motcombe, in whom tradition traces the uncouth lineaments of “Parson Trulliber” inJoseph Andrews. But he must have contrived, nevertheless, to prepare his pupil for Eton, to which place Fielding went about this date, probably as an oppidan. Little is known of his schooldays. There is no record of his name in the college lists; but, if we may believe his first biographer, Arthur Murphy, by no means an unimpeachable authority, he left “uncommonly versed in the Greek authors, and an early master of the Latin classics,”—a statement which should perhaps be qualified by his own words to Sir Robert Walpole in 1730:—

“Tuscan and French are in my head;Latin I write, and Greek—I read.”

“Tuscan and French are in my head;

Latin I write, and Greek—I read.”

But he certainly made friends among his class-fellows—some of whom continued friends for life. Winnington and Hanbury-Williams were among these. The chief, however, and the most faithful, was George, afterwards Sir George, and later Baron Lyttelton of Frankley.

When Fielding left Eton is unknown. But in November 1725 we hear of him definitely in what seems like a characteristic escapade. He was staying at Lyme (in company with a trusty retainer, ready to “beat, maim or kill” in his young master’s behalf), and apparently bent on carrying off, if necessary by force, a local heiress, Miss Sarah Andrew, whose fluttered guardians promptly hurried her away, and married her to some one else (Athenaeum, 2nd June 1883). Her baffled admirer consoled himself by translating part of Juvenal’s sixth satire into verse as “all the Revenge taken by an injured Lover.” After this he must have lived the usual life of a young man about town, and probably at this date improved the acquaintance of his second cousin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, to whom he inscribed his first comedy,Love in Several Masques, produced at Drury Lane in February 1728. The moment was not particularly favourable, since it succeeded Cibber’sProvok’d Husband, and was contemporary with Gay’s popularBeggar’s Opera. Almost immediately afterwards (March 16th) Fielding entered himself as “Stud. Lit.” at Leiden University. He was still there in February 1729. But he had apparently left before the annual registration of February 1730, when his name is absent from the books (Macmillan’s Magazine, April 1907); and in January 1730 he brought out a second comedy at the newly-opened theatre in Goodman’s Fields. Like its predecessor, theTempleBeauwas an essay in the vein of Congreve and Wycherley, though, in a measure, an advance onLove in Several Masques.

With theTemple BeauFielding’s dramatic career definitely begins. His father had married again; and his Leiden career had been interrupted for lack of funds. Nominally, he was entitled to an allowance of £200 a year; but this (he was accustomed to say) “any body might pay that would.” Young, handsome, ardent and fond of pleasure, he began that career as a hand-to-mouth playwright around which so much legend has gathered—and gathers. Having—in his own words—no choice but to be a hackney coachman or a hackney writer, he chose the pen; and his inclinations, as well as his opportunities, led him to the stage. From 1730 to 1736 he rapidly brought out a large number of pieces, most of which had merit enough to secure their being acted, but not sufficient to earn a lasting reputation for their author. His chief successes, from a critical point of view, theAuthor’s Farce(1730) andTom Thumb(1730, 1731), were burlesques; and he also was fortunate in two translations from Molière, theMock Doctor(1732) and theMiser(1733). Of the rest (with one or two exceptions, to be mentioned presently) the names need only be recorded. They areThe Coffee-House Politician, a comedy (1730);The Letter Writers, a farce (1731);The Grub-Street Opera, a burlesque (1731);The Lottery, a farce (1732);The Modern Husband, a comedy (1732);The Covent Garden Tragedy, a burlesque (1732);The Old Debauchees, a comedy (1732);Deborah; or, a Wife for you all, an after-piece (1733);The Intriguing Chambermaid(from Regnard), a two-act comedy (1734); andDon Quixote in England, a comedy, which had been partly sketched at Leiden.

Don Quixotewas produced in 1734, and the list of plays may be here interrupted by an event of which the date has only recently been ascertained, namely, Fielding’s first marriage. This took place on the 28th of November 1734 at St Mary, Charlcornbe, near Bath (Macmillan’s Magazine, April 1907), the lady being a Salisbury beauty, Miss Charlotte Cradock, of whom he had been an admirer, if not a suitor, as far back as 1730. This is a fact which should be taken into consideration in estimating the exact Bohemianism of his London life, for there is no doubt that he was devotedly attached to her. After a fresh farce entitledAn Old Man taught Wisdom, and the comparative failure of a new comedy,The Universal Gallant, both produced early in 1735, he seems for a time to have retired with his bride, who came into £1500, to his old home at East Stour. Around this rural seclusion fiction has freely accreted. He is supposed to have lived for three years on the footing of a typical 18th-century country gentleman; to have kept a pack of hounds; to have put his servants into impossible yellow liveries; and generally, by profuse hospitality and reckless expenditure, to have made rapid duck and drake of Mrs Fielding’s modest legacy. Something of this is demonstrably false; much, grossly exaggerated. In any case, he was in London as late as February 1735 (the date of the “Preface” toThe Universal Gallant); and early in March 1736 he was back again managing the Haymarket theatre with a so-called “Great Mogul’sCompany ofEnglishComedians.”

Upon this new enterprise fortune, at the outset, seemed to smile. The first piece (produced on the 5th of March) wasPasquin, a Dramatick Satire on the Times(a piece akin in its plan to Buckingham’sRehearsal), which contained, in addition to much admirable burlesque, a good deal of very direct criticism of the shameless political corruption of the Walpole era. Its success was unmistakable; and when, after bringing out the remarkableFatal Curiosityof George Lillo, its author followed upPasquinby theHistorical Register for the Year 1736, of which the effrontery was even more daring than that of its predecessor, the ministry began to bethink themselves that matters were going too far. How they actually effected their object is obscure: but grounds were speedily concocted for the Licensing Act of 1737, which restricted the number of theatres, rendered the lord chamberlain’s licence an indispensable preliminary to stage representation, and—in a word—effectually put an end to Fielding’s career as a dramatist.

Whether, had that career been prolonged to its maturity, the result would have enriched the theatrical repertoire with a new species of burlesque, or reinforced it with fresh variations on the “wit-traps” of Wycherley and Congreve, is one of those inquiries that are more academic than, profitable. What may be affirmed is, that Fielding’s plays, as we have them, exhibit abundant invention and ingenuity; that they are full of humour and high spirits; that, though they may have been hastily written, they were by no means thoughtlessly constructed; and that, in composing them, their author attentively considered either managerial hints, or the conditions of the market. Against this, one must set the fact that they are often immodest; and that, whatever their intrinsic merit, they have failed to rival in permanent popularity the work of inferior men. Fielding’s own conclusion was, “that he left off writing for the stage, when he ought to have begun”—which can only mean that he himself regarded his plays as the outcome of imitation rather than experience. They probably taught him how to constructTom Jones; but whether he could ever have written a comedy at the level of that novel, can only be established by a comparison which it is impossible to make, namely, a comparison withTom Jonesof a comedy written at the same age, and in similar circumstances.

Tumble-Down Dick; or, Phaeton in the Suds,EurydiceandEurydice hissedare the names of three occasional pieces which belong to the last months of Fielding’s career as a Haymarket manager. By this date he was thirty, with a wife and daughter. As a means of support, he reverted to the profession of his maternal grandfather; and, in November 1737, he entered the Middle Temple, being described in the books of the society as “of East Stour in Dorset.” That he set himself strenuously to master his new profession, is admitted; though it is unlikely that he had entirely discarded the irregular habits which had grown upon him in his irresponsible bachelorhood. He also did a good deal of literary work, the best known of which is contained in theChampion, a “News-Journal” of theSpectatortype undertaken with James Ralph, whose poem of “Night” is made notorious in theDunciad. That theChampionwas not without merit is undoubted; but the essay-type was for the moment out-worn, and neither Fielding nor his coadjutor could lend it fresh vitality. Fielding contributed papers from the 15th of November 1739 to the 19th of June 1740. On the 20th of June he was called to the bar, and occupied chambers in Pump Court. It is further related that, in the diligent pursuit of his calling, he travelled the Western Circuit, and attended the Wiltshire sessions.

Although, with theChampion, he professed, for the time, to have relinquished periodical literature, he still wrote at intervals, a fact which, taken in connexion with his past reputation as an effective satirist, probably led to his being “unjustly censured” for much that he never produced. But he certainly wrote a poem “Of True Greatness” (1741); a first book of a burlesque epic, theVernoniad, prompted by Vernon’s expedition of 1739; a vision called theOpposition, and, perhaps, a political sermon entitled theCrisis(1741). Another piece, now known to have been attributed to him by his contemporaries (Hist. MSS. Comm., Rept.12, App. Pt. ix., p. 204), is the pamphlet entitledAn Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews, a clever but coarse attack upon the prurient side of Richardson’sPamela, which had been issued in 1740, and was at the height of its popularity.Shamelafollowed early in 1741. Richardson, who was well acquainted with Fielding’s four sisters, at that date his neighbours at Hammersmith, confidently attributed it to Fielding (Corr.1804, iv. 286, and unpublished letter at South Kensington); and there are suggestive points of internal evidence (such as the transformation ofPamela’s“MR B.” into “Mr Booby”) which tend to connect it with the futureJoseph Andrews. Fielding, however, never acknowledged it, or referred to it; and a great deal has been laid to his charge that he never deserved (“Preface” toMiscellanies, 1743).

But whatever may be decided in regard to the authorship ofShamela, it is quite possible that it prompted the more memorableJoseph Andrews, which made its appearance in February 1742, and concerning which there is no question. Professing, on his title-page, to imitate Cervantes, Fielding set out to coverPamelawith Homeric ridicule by transferring the heroine’s embarrassments to a hero, supposed to be her brother. Allied to this purpose was a collateral attack upon the slipshodApologyof the playwright Colley Cibber, with whom, for obscure reasons, Fielding had long been at war. But the avowed object of the book fell speedily into the background as its author warmed to his theme. His secondary speedily became his primary characters, and Lady Booby and Joseph Andrews do not interest us now as much as Mrs Slipslop and Parson Adams—the latter an invention that ranges in literature with Sterne’s “Uncle Toby” and Goldsmith’s “Vicar.” Yet more than these and others equally admirable in their round veracity, is the writer’s penetrating outlook upon the frailties and failures of human nature. By the time he had reached his second volume, he had convinced himself that he had inaugurated a new fashion of fiction; and in a “Preface” of exceptional ability, he announced his discovery. Postulating that the epic might be “comic” or “tragic,” prose or verse, he claimed to have achieved what he termed the “Comic Epos in Prose,” of which the action was “ludicrous” rather than “sublime,” and the personages selected from society at large, rather than the restricted ranks of conventional high life. His plan, it will be observed, was happily adapted to his gifts of humour, satire, and above all, irony. That it was matured when it began may perhaps be doubted, but it was certainly matured when it ended. Indeed, except for the plot, which, in his picaresque first idea, had not preceded the conception,Joseph Andrewshas all the characteristics ofTom Jones, even (in part) to the initial chapters.

Joseph Andrewshad considerable success, and the exact sum paid for it by Andrew Millar, the publisher, according to the assignment now at South Kensington, was £183:11s., one of the witnesses being the author’s friend, William Young, popularly supposed to be the original of Parson Adams. It was with Young that Fielding undertook what, with exception of “a very small share” in the farce ofMiss Lucy in Town(1742), constituted his next work, a translation of thePlutusof Aristophanes, which never seems to have justified any similar experiments. Another of his minor works was aVindication of the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough(1742), then much before the public by reason of theAccount of her Lifewhich she had recently put forth. Later in the same year, Garrick applied to Fielding for a play; and a very early effort,The Wedding Day, was hastily patched together, and produced at Drury Lane in February 1743 with no great success. It was, however, included in Fielding’s next important publication, the three volumes ofMiscellaniesissued by subscription in the succeeding April. These also comprised some early poems, some essays, a Lucianic fragment entitled aJourney from this World to the Next, and, last but not least, occupying the entire final volume, the remarkable performance entitled theHistory of the Life of the late Mr Jonathan Wild the Great.

It is probable that, in its composition,Jonathan WildprecededJoseph Andrews. At all events it seems unlikely that Fielding would have followed up a success in a new line by an effort so entirely different in character. Taking for his ostensible hero a well-known thief-taker, who had been hanged in 1725, he proceeds to illustrate, by a mock-heroic account of his progress to Tyburn, the general proposition that greatness without goodness is no better than badness. He will not go so far as to say that all “Human Nature is Newgate with the Mask on”; but he evidently regards the description as fairly applicable to a good many so-called great people. Irony (and especially Irony neat) is not a popular form of rhetoric; and the remorseless pertinacity with which Fielding pursues his demonstration is to many readers discomforting and even distasteful. Yet—in spite of Scott—Jonathan Wildhas its softer pages; and as a purely intellectual conception it is not surpassed by any of the author’s works.

His actual biography, both before and afterJonathan Wild, is obscure. There are evidences that he laboured diligently at his profession; there are also evidences of sickness and embarrassment. He had become early a martyr to the malady of his century—gout, and the uncertainties of a precarious livelihood told grievously upon his beautiful wife, who eventually died of fever in his arms, leaving him for the time so stunned and bewildered by grief that his friends feared for his reason. For some years his published productions were unimportant. He wrote “Prefaces” to theDavid Simpleof his sister Sarah in 1744 and 1747; and, in 1745-1746 and 1747-1748, produced two newspapers in the ministerial interest, theTrue Patriotand theJacobite’s Journal, both of which are connected with, or derive from, the rebellion of 1745, and were doubtless, when they ceased, the pretext of a pension from the public service money (Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, “Introduction”). In November 1747 he married his wife’s maid, Mary Daniel, at St Bene’t’s, Paul’s Wharf; and in December 1748, by the interest of his old school-fellow, Lyttelton, he was made a principal justice of peace for Middlesex and Westminster, an office which put him in possession of a house in Bow Street, and £300 per annum “of the dirtiest money upon earth” (ibid.), which might have been more had he condescended to become what was known as a “trading” magistrate.

For some time previously, while at Bath, Salisbury, Twickenham and other temporary resting-places, he had intermittently occupied himself in composing his second great novel,Tom Jones; or, the History of a Foundling. For this, in June 1748, Millar had paid him £600, to which he added £100 more in 1749. In the February of the latter year it was published with a dedication to Lyttelton, to whose pecuniary assistance to the author during the composition it plainly bears witness. InTom JonesFielding systematically developed the “new Province of Writing” he had discovered incidentally inJoseph Andrews. He paid closer attention to the construction and evolution of the plot; he elaborated the initial essays to each book which he had partly employed before, and he compressed into his work the flower and fruit of his forty years’ experience of life. He has, indeed, no character quite up to the level of Parson Adams, but his Westerns and Partridges, his Allworthys and Blifils, have the inestimable gift of life. He makes no pretence to produce “models of perfection,” but pictures of ordinary humanity, rather perhaps in the rough than the polished, the natural than the artificial, and his desire is to do this with absolute truthfulness, neither extenuating nor disguising defects and shortcomings. One of the results of this unvarnished naturalism has been to attract more attention to certain of the episodes than their inventor ever intended. But that, in the manners of his time, he had chapter and verse for everything he drew is clear. His sincere purpose was, he declared, “to recommend goodness and innocence,” and his obvious aversions are vanity and hypocrisy. The methods of fiction have grown more sophisticated since his day, and other forms of literary egotism have taken the place of his once famous introductory essays, but the traces ofTom Jonesare still discernible in most of our manlier modern fiction.

Meanwhile, its author was showing considerable activity in his magisterial duties. In May 1749, he was chosen chairman of quarter sessions for Westminster; and in June he delivered himself of a weighty charge to the grand jury. Besides other pamphlets, he produced a careful and still readableEnquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers, &c. (1751), which, among its other merits, was not ineffectual in helping on the famous Gin Act of that year, a practical result to which the “Gin Lane” and “Beer Street” of his friend Hogarth also materially contributed. These duties and preoccupations left their mark on his next fiction,Amelia(1752), which is rather more taken up with social problems and popular grievances than its forerunners. But the leading personage, in whom, as in the Sophia Western ofTom Jones, he reproduced the traits of his first wife, is certainly, as even Johnson admitted, “the most pleasing heroine of all the romances.” The minor characters, too, especially Dr Harrison and Colonel Bath, are equal to any inTom Jones. The book nevertheless shows signs, not of failure but of fatigue, perhapsof haste—a circumstance heightened by the absence of those “prolegomenous” chapters over which the author had lingered so lovingly inTom Jones. In 1749 he had been dangerously ill, and his health was visibly breaking. The £1000 which Millar is said to have given forAmeliamust have been painfully earned.

Early in 1752 his still indomitable energy prompted him to start a third newspaper, theCovent Garden Journal, which ran from the 4th of January to the 25th of November. It is an interesting contemporary record, and throws a good deal of light on his Bow Street duties. But it has no great literary value, and it unhappily involved him in harassing and undignified hostilities with Smollett, Dr John Hill, Bonnell Thornton and other of his contemporaries. To the following year belong pamphlets on “Provision for the Poor,” and the case of the strange impostor, Elizabeth Canning (1734-1773).1By 1754 his own case, as regards health, had grown desperate; and he made matters worse by a gallant and successful attempt to break up a “gang of villains and cut-throats,” who had become the terror of the metropolis. This accomplished, he resigned his office to his half-brother John (afterwards Sir John) Fielding. But it was now too late. After fruitless essay both of Dr Ward’s specifics and the tar-water of Bishop Berkeley, it was felt that his sole chance of prolonging life lay in removal to a warmer climate. On the 26th of June 1754 he accordingly left his little country house at Fordhook, Ealing, for Lisbon, in the “Queen of Portugal,” Richard Veal master. The ship, as often, was tediously wind-bound, and the protracted discomforts of the sick man and his family are narrated at length in the touching posthumous tract entitled theJournal of a Voyage to Lisbon, which, with a fragment of a comment on Bolingbroke’s then recently issued essays, was published in February 1755 “for the Benefit of his [Fielding’s] Wife and Children.” Reaching Lisbon at last in August 1754, he died there two months later (8th October), and was buried in the English cemetery, where a monument was erected to him in 1830.Luget Britannia gremio non dari fovere natumis inscribed upon it.

His estate, including the proceeds of a fair library, only covered his just debts (Athenaeum, 25th Nov. 1905); but his family, a daughter by his first, and two boys and a girl by his second wife, were faithfully cared for by his brother John, and by his friend Ralph Allen of Prior Park, Bath, the Squire Allworthy ofTom Jones. His will (undated) was printed in theAthenaeumfor the 1st of February 1890. There is but one absolutely authentic portrait of him, a familiar outline by Hogarth, executed from memory for Andrew Millar’s edition of his works in 1762. It is the likeness of a man broken by ill-health, and affords but faint indication of the handsome Harry Fielding who in his salad days “warmed both hands before the fire of life.” Far too much stress, it is now held, has been laid by his first biographers upon the unworshipful side of his early career. That he was always profuse, sanguine and more or less improvident, is as probable as that he was always manly, generous and sympathetic. But it is also plain that, in his later years, he did much, as father, friend and magistrate, to redeem the errors, real and imputed, of a too-youthful youth.

As a playwright and essayist his rank is not elevated. But as a novelist his place is a definite one. If theSpectatoris to be credited with foreshadowing the characters of the novel, Defoe with its earliest form, and Richardson with its first experiments in sentimental analysis, it is to Henry Fielding that we owe its first accurate delineation of contemporary manners. Neglecting, or practically neglecting, sentiment as unmanly, and relying chiefly on humour and ridicule, he set out to draw life precisely as he saw it around him, without blanks or dashes. He was, it may be, for a judicial moralist, too indulgent to some of its frailties, but he was merciless to its meaner vices. For reasons which have been already given, his high-water mark isTom Jones, which has remained, and remains, a model in its way of the kind he inaugurated.

An essay on Fielding’s life and writings is prefixed to Arthur Murphy’s edition of his works (1762), and short biographies have been written by Walter Scott and William Roscoe. There are also lives by Watson (1807), Lawrence (1855), Austin Dobson (“Men of Letters,” 1883, 1907) and G.M. Godden (1909). An annotated edition of theJournal of a Voyage to Lisbonis included in the “World’s Classics” (1907).

(A. D.)

1For a full account of this celebrated case see Howell,State Trials(1813), vol. xix.

FIELDING, WILLIAM STEVENS(1848- ), Canadian journalist and statesman, was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the 24th of November 1848. From 1864 to 1884 he was one of the staff of theMorning Chronicle, the chief Liberal paper of the province, and worked at all departments of newspaper life. In 1882 he entered the local legislature as Liberal member for Halifax, and from 1884 to 1896 was premier and provincial secretary of the province, but in the latter year became finance minister in the Dominion administration of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and was elected to the House of Commons for Shelburne and Queen’s county. He opposed Confederation in 1864-1867, and as late as 1886 won a provincial election on the promise to advocate the repeal of the British North America Act. His administration as finance minister of Canada was important, since in 1897 he introduced a new tariff, granting to the manufactures of Great Britain a preference, subsequently increased; and later he imposed a special surtax on German imports owing to unfriendly tariff legislation by that country. In 1902 he represented Canada at the Colonial Conference in London.

FIELD-MOUSE,the popular designation of such mouse-like British rodents as are not true or “house” mice. The term thus includes the long-tailed field mouse,Mus(Micromys)sylvaticus, easily recognized by its white belly, and sometimes called the wood-mouse; and the two species of short-tailed field-mice,Microtus agrestisandEvotomys glareolus, together with their representatives in Skomer island and the Orkneys (seeMouseandVole).

FIELD OF THE CLOTH OF GOLD,the FrenchCamp du drap d’or, the name given to the place between Guînes and Ardres where Henry VIII. of England met Francis I. of France in June 1520. The most elaborate arrangements were made for the accommodation of the two monarchs and their large retinues; and on Henry’s part especially no efforts were spared to make a great impression in Europe by this meeting. Before the castle of Guînes a temporary palace, covering an area of nearly 12,000 sq. yds., was erected for the reception of the English king. It was decorated in the most sumptuous fashion, and like the chapel, served by thirty-five priests, was furnished with a profusion of golden ornaments. Some idea of the size of Henry’s following may be gathered from the fact that in one month 2200 sheep and other viands in a similar proportion were consumed. In the fields beyond the castle, tents to the number of 2800 were erected for less distinguished visitors, and the whole scene was one of the greatest animation. Ladies gorgeously clad, and knights, showing by their dress and bearing their anxiety to revive the glories and the follies of the age of chivalry, jostled mountebanks, mendicants and vendors of all kinds.

Journeying from Calais Henry reached his headquarters at Guînes on the 4th of June 1520, and Francis took up his residence at Ardres. After Cardinal Wolsey, with a splendid train had visited the French king, the two monarchs met at the Val Doré, a spot midway between the two places, on the 7th. The following days weretakenup with tournaments, in which both kings took part, banquets and other entertainments, and after Wolsey had said mass the two sovereigns separated on the 24th. This meeting made a great impression on contemporaries, but its political results were very small.

TheOrdonnancefor theFieldis printed by J.S. Brewer in theCalendar of State Papers, Henry VIII. vol. iii. (1867). See also J.S. Brewer,Reign of Henry VIII. (1884).

FIELDS, JAMES THOMAS(1817-1881), American publisher and author, was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on the 31st of December 1817. At the age of seventeen he went to Boston as clerk in a bookseller’s shop. Afterwards he wrote for the newspapers, and in 1835 he read an anniversary poem entitled “Commerce” before the Boston Mercantile LibraryAssociation. In 1839 he became junior partner in the publishing and bookselling firm known after 1846 as Ticknor & Fields, and after 1868 as Fields, Osgood & Company. He was the publisher of the foremost contemporary American writers, with whom he was on terms of close personal friendship, and he was the American publisher of some of the best-known British writers of his time, some of whom, also, he knew intimately. The first collected edition of De Quincey’s works (20 vols., 1850-1855) was published by his firm. As a publisher he was characterized by a somewhat rare combination of keen business acumen and sound, discriminating literary taste, and as a man he was known for his geniality and charm of manner. In 1862-1870, as the successor of James Russell Lowell, he edited theAtlantic Monthly. In 1871 Fields retired from business and from his editorial duties, and devoted himself to lecturing and to writing. Of his books the chief were the collection of sketches and essays entitledUnderbrush(1877) and the chapters of reminiscence composingYesterdays with Authors(1871), in which he recorded his personal friendship with Wordsworth, Thackeray, Dickens, Hawthorne and others. He died in Boston on the 24th of April 1881.

His second wife,Annie Adams Fields(b. 1834), whom he married in 1854, publishedUnder the Olive(1880), a book of verses;James T. Fields: Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches(1882);Authors and Friends(1896);The Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe(1897); andOrpheus(1900).

FIENNES, NATHANIEL(c.1608-1669) English politician, second son of William, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele, by Elizabeth, daughter of John Temple, of Stow in Buckinghamshire, was born in 1607 or 1608, and educated at Winchester and at New College, Oxford, where as founder’s kin he was admitted a perpetual fellow in 1624. After about five years’ residence he left without taking a degree, travelled abroad, and in Switzerland imbibed or strengthened those religious principles and that hostility to the Laudian church which were to be the chief motive in his future political career. He returned to Scotland in 1639, and established communications with the Covenanters and the Opposition in England, and as member for Banbury in both the Short and Long Parliaments he took a prominent part in the attacks upon the church. He spoke against the illegal canons on the 14th of December 1640, and again on the 9th of February 1641 on the occasion of the reception of the London petition, when he argued against episcopacy as constituting a political as well as a religious danger and made a great impression on the House, his name being added immediately to the committee appointed to deal with church affairs. He took a leading part in the examination into the army plot; was one of the commissioners appointed to attend the king to Scotland in August 1641; and was nominated one of the committee of safety in July 1642. On the outbreak of hostilities he took arms immediately, commanded a troop of horse in the army of Lord Essex, was present at the relief of Coventry in August, and at the fight at Worcester in September, where he distinguished himself, and subsequently at Edgehill. Of the last two engagements he wrote accounts, viz.True and Exact Relation of both the Battles fought by ... Earl of Essex ... against the Bloudy Cavaliers(1642). (See alsoA Narrative of the Late Battle before Worcester taken by a Gentleman of the Inns of Court from the mouth of Master Fiennes, 1642). In February 1643 Fiennes was sent down to Bristol, arrested Colonel Essex the governor, executed the two leaders of a plot to deliver up the city, and received a commission himself as governor on the 1st of May 1643. On the arrival, however, of Prince Rupert on the 22nd of July the place was in no condition to resist an attack, and Fiennes capitulated. He addressed to Essex a letter in his defence (Thomason Tracts E. 65, 26), drew up for the parliament aRelation concerning the Surrender... (1643), answered by Prynne and Clement Walker accusing him of treachery and cowardice, to which he opposedCol. Fiennes his Reply.... He was tried at St Albans by the council of war in December, was pronounced guilty of having surrendered the place improperly, and sentenced to death. He was, however, pardoned, and the facility with which Bristol subsequently capitulated to the parliamentary army induced Cromwell and the generals to exonerate him completely. His military career nevertheless now came to an end. He went abroad, and it was some time before he reappeared on the political scene. In September 1647 he was included in the army committee, and on the 3rd of January 1648 he became a member of the committee of safety. He was, however, in favour of accepting the king’s terms at Newport in December, and in consequence was excluded from the House by Pride’s Purge. An opponent of church government in any form, he was no friend to the rigid and tyrannical Presbyterianism of the day, and inclined to Independency and Cromwell’s party. He was a member of the council of state in 1654, and in June 1655 he received the strange appointment of commissioner for the custody of the great seal, for which he was certainly in no way fitted. In the parliament of 1654 he was returned for Oxford county and in that of 1656 for the university, while in January 1658 he was included in Cromwell’s House of Lords. He was in favour of the Protector’s assumption of the royal title and urged his acceptance of it on several occasions. His public career closes with addresses delivered in his capacity as chief commissioner of the great seal at the beginning of the sessions of January 20, 1658, and January 2, 1659, in which the religious basis of Cromwell’s government is especially insisted upon, the feature to which Fiennes throughout his career had attached most value. On the reassembling of the Long Parliament he was superseded; he took no part in the Restoration, and died at Newton Tony in Wiltshire on the 16th of December 1669. Fiennes married (1), Elizabeth, daughter of the famous parliamentarian Sir John Eliot, by whom he had one son, afterwards 3rd Viscount Saye and Sele; and (2), Frances, daughter of Richard Whitehead of Tuderley, Hants, by whom he had three daughters.

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